“Goodnight, Marvin”

My In Memorium to Douglas Adams as published in April 2005 by Benbella Books as part of the Anthology at the End of the Universe: Leading Science Fiction Authors On Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (Smart Pop series), edited by Glenn Yeffeth.

May 12, 2001

This is a very sad day.

I woke up this morning and got ready to see the press screening of Shrek with my friend Abbie. I was completely unaware that something singular had happened in the world — in my world — the day before and a strange nostalgia fogged my head. For the first time in nearly sixteen years, I put on a very special shirt: a baseball jersey with cobalt blue sleeves. On the front of the white, see-through part of the jersey, it says, “Don’t Panic”; on the back it reads, “Re-elect Zaphod Beeblebrox for President.” My mother made that shirt for my fifteenth birthday. I wore it this morning because I suddenly felt like it for no apparent reason.

I was (and still am) a huge Douglas Adams fan. I loved everything the man said and wrote. He single-handedly shaped my sense of humor, made me an Anglophile, and crowned me Queen of Geekdom at my junior high and high school. At band camp, my friends and I even wore towels slung over our shoulders and asked others, “Do you know where your towel is?” We would squint at the other band geeks, saying, “But there aren’t any real people here at all!” We were hopeless nerds. Yet, we were unique.

I couldn’t wait to get a picture of Douglas Adams. I had the biggest, most awful crush on him. Once I did get his picture, I was very disappointed. My mother found me frowning over it in the TV Guide.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“He’s old and tall and silly looking,” I lamented.

My mother shrugged. “Well, honey, sometimes men are like that.”

I discovered him in my early teens when I was listening to NPR. That’s when I first heard the banjo strains that opened each episode of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series. Suddenly, life in a joyless religious home was not so bad. He was shockingly blasphemous, with all his tidbits about God; I tried somehow to reconcile my beliefs with how much I enjoyed him, but it never worked. Still, I listened. And I laughed.

I recorded every episode onto tapes that are now brittle and dusty. To this day, I keep them in a wobbly shoe box, even though I bought the official BBC tapes long ago. My little sister once copied over part of Episode Four with Michael Jackson songs. Just after I assured her that there was “a special place in heaven for little sisters,” my mother walked in. If it had only been a few minutes later, I would have been an only child again.

But Douglas Adams did so much more than Hitchhiker’s Guide. He wrote five HG books altogether, two Dirk Gently novels (which inspired my novelette “Samantha Blazes: Psychic Detective of L.A.”), The Meaning of Liff and more.

I once sent him a “belated birthday” letter — somewhere around three months after his birthday. I wanted to make it a habit, but I forgot more often than not. I told him in the letter about the “Don’t Panic” shirt, and said that I hadn’t worn it in years because it was “entirely see-through.” (You could see my bra. It embarrassed me to death as a teen.) I wanted to make him laugh because his insane sense of humor taught a thirteen-year-old girl how to laugh when life betrayed her. His humor and irreverence gave her a chance to enjoy life when faith and family failed.

This morning, we saw Shrek and I laughed a lot — something I do quite a bit these days. I went home afterwards to write. But this evening, Abbie called me to tell me that Douglas Adams died yesterday of a heart attack. He was only forty-nine. When we hung up, I cried. And I cried. I didn’t know him as some of you did. Maybe he was too old and tall and silly, but I loved him anyway in my own special way. He is a part of me and always will be. And I think it was his ghost whispering to me as I dressed this morning, saying, “Well, now that I’m dead, let’s have a look at you in that see-through shirt, shall we?”

Goodnight, Marvin. At least now that pain in all the diodes down your left side has stopped. But I will really, really miss you. . . .

MARIA ALEXANDER is a multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning YA author and Anthony Award nominee who’s been a published author of dark fiction for almost 20 years. She’s repped by Alexander Slater at Trident Media Group and she lives in Los Angeles. Her patronus is John Wick’s ’69 Mustang.